Sunrise (Ashfall Trilogy)
Page 34
“I was told you elected your leader. Like they did in the dead age, the fat age.”
Keep the pressure on his ego, I thought. “You and I both know that this is an age for the strong. You kill me, and there’s nothing stopping you from claiming my place, from ruling over my greenhouses. My people.” I stepped forward, letting the light from the lantern hit my knife.
“You’d stand as much chance against me in a fair fight as a strawberry in a blender,” he said.
“So what are you waiting for?” I stretched my arms and neck and took another step toward him.
“You’ll face me one on one? Knife to knife?”
“I give you my word.”
Red threw my mother to the road and leapt, drawing his gladius midair and coming down on top of me in a flurry of knife blows. I tried to block his gladius with my hook, missed, and it bit into the back of my forearm. The scrape of the blade against my bone sent icy shivers up my spine and fiery licks of flame up my arm. His other knife slashed at my eyes, and I ducked, taking the blow on my forehead. Blood ran into my eyes, turning the world into a confused patchwork of red and black shadows.
I stabbed toward his stomach, but he was ready for me, throwing his hips backward to dodge the blow. A knife flashed from somewhere, cutting my right wrist on the inside, where the tendons and arteries run. My fingers loosened involuntarily, and my knife fell to the snow.
I was hopelessly outclassed. Darla stepped into the circle of light, raising her rifle, but he was on top of me again. If she shot him, the bullet would likely hit me too. Shadowed forms moved in the darkness. The gladius swept down, and I saw it barely in time to step inward, toward the strike, and throw my hook up. My hook caught his wrist, not the blade, slicing deep into the joint. The gladius fell, clunking harmlessly into the padded shoulder of my coat on its way down.
My head swam, and my vision constricted. All I could see out of the corners of my eyes was blackness, and the rest of my field of vision wasn’t much better, rendered splotchy red by the blood pouring from my forehead. I was losing far too much blood. I had to end this fight, fast.
Red thrust with his other knife, and I dodged to the side, taking the blow on the outside of my thigh instead of in my groin. He stepped toward me, knife held low for another gutting strike. I kicked out, trying to sweep his legs from under him with a round kick. It worked, but my injured leg buckled, and we both went down. Somehow Red wound up on top of me, his knife above my throat, bearing inexorably downward.
I felt consciousness fading. I was finished. If this had been a taekwondo fight, I might have stood a chance. But during all those thousands of hours I had spent training in taekwondo, Red had been training with knives. At least my mother was okay, I thought as the knife bit effortlessly into the scarf at my neck.
The butt of a rifle slammed into the side of Red’s head. Instantly the pressure on the knife eased. I threw Red off me, rolling him onto his back in the snow beside me. Darla reversed the rifle and shot him three times at a range of less than five feet, hitting him dead in the center of his chest.
The knife dropped from his limp fingers. Darla stepped over me and prodded Red’s body with the toe of her black combat boot. He didn’t move. “I didn’t promise you a goddamn thing,” she hissed. “And I never fight fair.”
She safetied the rifle and slung it over her back. Then she was on her knees beside me, cutting strips of cloth and bandaging my wounds at a near-frenzied pace.
Mom crawled over to help. Blood ran freely from the cut on her neck, staining the snow. She glanced at Darla. “You . . . you . . .”
Darla was silent, still working on the deep cut in my left arm.
Mom hesitated a moment and then said, “You saved my son.”
Darla nodded but said nothing, focused on her work.
When they had finished putting temporary patches on all my leaks, Darla pushed herself to her feet. She reached down, helping Mom up. “Can I help you with that cut on your neck?”
“I . . . yes. Thank you.”
Darla turned away, presumably to get more medical supplies, but Mom didn’t let go. She pulled Darla back, drawing her into a fierce embrace. Blood dripped from Mom’s neck into Darla’s hair. I closed my eyes for a moment—the pain had peaked and set off a wave of nausea so intense, it was all I could do not to vomit.
Our troops had taken all the weapons from the nine Reds who were left. “You have one day to leave the State of Illinois,” Darla told them. “If you walk west on Highway 20 all night and all day tomorrow, you might make it. I catch you in this state again, you’ll be shot.”
The cut in Mom’s neck was superficial. Darla used a scrap of boiled cloth and a precious strip of duct tape to hold it closed. We had three other people wounded, but miraculously no one had been killed. Darla organized a party to drag Red and his ten dead followers over the snow berm and bury them.
We camped the rest of the night in the ruins of the bank. I wanted desperately to get home—my wounds needed Dr. McCarthy’s attention—but blundering around in the darkness wouldn’t help.
The trip back to Speranta was slow because we didn’t have enough people to fully man all the Bikezillas. I couldn’t pedal at all and had to ride along like cargo. We arrived back at the longhouse well after lunchtime.
Bob Petty was waiting inside the door of Longhouse One. As I came in riding on a makeshift stretcher, he grabbed my hand, his lips worked, and he stared at me beseechingly, but no words came. I shook his hand off mine, and my stretcher bearers carried me through. Mom was right behind us. When she stepped through the door, Petty burst into tears. Mom leaned down to hug him, and they held each other for a moment.
“How’s Alexia?” Mom asked.
“She’s fine. Rebecca and Wyn are taking good care of her,” Petty said.
Darla tried to step around the logjam at the door, but Mom reached out and grabbed her elbow. “Bob, I want to introduce my daughter-in-law, Darla Halprin.”
“We’ve met,” Petty said, shaking Darla’s hand gravely.
Nylce, Rita Mae, and the kids from Worthington were back already. They had taken Stagecoach Trail, bypassing
Stockton completely. Anna, Charlotte, Uncle Paul, and Belinda were all working with the kids, trying to get them settled.
I spent the rest of the day in Dr. McCarthy’s makeshift OR. He gave me a blood transfusion, reopened all my wounds, cleaned them, stitched them closed again, and rebandaged them. I was only conscious part of the time.
Early the next morning, I sent for Mom, Alyssa, and Rita Mae. They sat around my cot in what I jokingly called the sickbay. “We need to turn Speranta into a real town. We’re finally producing a significant food surplus. It’s time to open a real school and a library.”
“I’m a little too old to be changing careers,” Rita Mae said, “so I guess you’ll be wanting me to open a library” “I’d be grateful if you would. I’ll see if I can get Uncle Paul and Darla to give up their stash of technical manuals so you can get those organized to start. And Ben’s been collecting military books.”
I turned to Mom, and she spoke up before I could. “I don’t think I have time. I’ve got to take care of Alexia.” Mom drummed her fingers on the table, forgetting her missing pinkie. When the stump hit the table’s rough surface, her face scrunched up, and she moved both hands to her lap. Alyssa watched anxiously
“I know someone who’d love to help with babysitting,” I said.
Mom looked down at the table. “I’m not sure why she’d want to help me, after—”
“It’s okay, Mom. We’ve all . . . it’s been a hard couple of years.” I laid my hand palm up along the edge of the cot, asking her to take it. “I never stopped loving you. Darla doesn’t know you the way I do, but if you let her, she’ll love you too.”
Mom wiped her eyes and took my hand. “I’d be honored to start Speranta’s first school.”
“I want to help,” Alyssa said.
“I know,” I said. “Yo
u’ll both be assigned to the school full time. We’ll add more teachers as soon as we can spare the manpower.”
“We’ll both teach,” Mom said. “And I’ll start training Alyssa to take over the school in case—well, when I can’t do it anymore. What did you have in mind as far as students?” “Start with the youngest kids—say, everyone ten and under,” I said. “As soon as we can—as soon as I’m sure we can handle it, labor and food-wise—we’ll expand the school a year at a time. Within six months or so, I hope to have everyone under sixteen in school.”
“Maybe we should plan a trade school or apprenticeship program for those older than sixteen. We need more builders, engineers, and farmers, right?” Mom said.
“Good idea. Put your heads together and figure out what you want in terms of a building to house both the library and school.”
My wounds were deep; it took six weeks before I felt strong enough to resume a normal schedule. A few days of strangely warm weather greeted my return to the workforce. Late each afternoon the temperature even rose briefly above freezing; the top layer of the snow turned slushy, perfect for snowball fights. After a couple days of that, a storm blew through. We huddled in the longhouse, listening to the thunder in amazement—between the drought and winter, we hadn’t had an honest-to-God thunderstorm in more than three years. When it ended a couple of hours after dark, Darla and I took a lantern and wandered around outside. The rain had frozen, leaving a crunchy layer atop the snow. The lantern’s beam glittered on the ice, throwing magical yellow and orange sparkles across the snowscape.
Uncle Paul yelled to us from the longhouse door. “Turbines 8-A and 8-B didn’t get shut off in time. Storm burned them out. We’re going to lose four greenhouses if we don’t get some power over there.”
Darla sighed and dropped my hand. “I’ve gotta go. Don’t wait up.”
“Want help?”
She smiled her answer, and I wound up spending all night helping her and a crew of other volunteers string temporary lines from other turbine towers to fill the hole in our electrical grid. By the time we got back to the long-house, the sky was already hinting at grayness.
“Let me show you my favorite place to watch the sunrise,” I said.
“Aren’t you tired?” she asked.
“Sure. But it won’t take long.”
We got two claw hammers and climbed the longhouse roof together, sitting on the peak.
“I am freezing my butt off,” Darla said, “literally.” “That would be a true national tragedy.”
She laughed, a sound as lovely as the crystalline shards of light refracted off the new ice.
“I talked to Dr. McCarthy while I was in sickbay,” I said. “There was a good obstetrics department at the hospital in Dixon. They had heart monitors, preemie incubators, all that stuff. There’s no reason anyone would have looted the equipment, since nobody else has electric power—it should still be there. Doc thought maybe we could mount an expedition and move a bunch of it back here. There’s some other stuff he could use too.”
“Are you . . . are you saying what I think you are?”
“I am. Let’s start a family.”
Darla leaned over and kissed me long and softly, setting off fireworks in my brain and longing in my body that lingered well after the kiss ended.
We sat on the roof, our good arms wrapped around each other, watching the sunrise. The gray turned to a low line of deep red rising from the horizon, and then streaks of pink shot from the line, and it transformed, bursting into yellows and violets and oranges and greens and even, wonder of wonders, a patch of pure blue sky. It was the most spectacular sunrise I had ever seen.
The first sunrise of the rest of our lives.
Acknowledgments
I have a whole round table of literary knights in my corner: my wife, Margaret, slayer of unnecessary dialogue and prepositional phrases; Robert Kent, champion of the action scene; Lisa Fipps, warrior of t word choice; Shannon Lee Alexander, chevalier of characterization; Jody Sparks, the emotional knight; s and Josh Prokopy, the squire. Thank you all.
Thank you to the people of northwest Illinois who were so warm and generous during my research trips. Thanks in particular to the people of Stockton. I owe you at least two apologies: one for the liberties I took with the physical layout of your town and another for making my fictional Stocktonites far less friendly than the real ones.
Thank you to Krista Fry for some last-minute help on high school sports in Warren and Stockton.
Thank you to Jim Cobb, author of Prepper’s Home Defense. The hour you spent talking to me about post-apocalyptic Chicago greatly influenced my depiction of Rockford, Illinois.
Thanks again to my brother Paul, his wife Caroline, and their children Max and Anna for lending their names to my books. Sorry the characters named in your honor didn’t all survive! I also deeply appreciate the two hours Paul spent with me (during his own birthday party!) brainstorming ways to heat greenhouses with wind turbines.
Thank you to Lisa Rojany Buccieri for making me work far harder than I wanted, polishing this book. Your insightful edits dramatically improved my work, and I’m grateful. Thank you to Dorothy Chambers for uncrossing my i’s and undotting my t’s. Thank you to Ana Correal for another gorgeous cover image.
I cannot thank everyone at Tanglewood Press and Publishers Group West enough, particularly Peggy Tierney, whom I’m proud to claim as my editor and friend. You’ve all labored so hard to connect readers with my books. Truly, I owe my career to you.
About the Author
Mike Mullin’s first job was scraping the gum off the undersides of desks at his high school. From there, things went steadily downhill. He almost got fired by the owner of a bookstore due to his poor taste in earrings. He worked at a place that showed slides of poopy diapers during lunch (it did cut down on the cafeteria budget). The hazing process at the next company included eating live termites raised by the resident entomologist, so that didn’t last long either. For a while Mike juggled bottles at a wine shop, sometimes to disastrous effect. Oh, and then there was the job where swarms of wasps occasionally tried to chase him off ladders. So he’s really glad this writing thing seems to be working out.
Mike holds a black belt in Songahm Taekwondo. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and her three cats. Sunrise is his third novel. The first book in this trilogy, Ashfall, was named one of the top five young adult novels of 2011 by National Public Radio, a Best Teen Book of 2011 by Kirkus Reviews, and a New Voices selection by the American Booksellers Association.
Connect with Mike at www.mikemullinauthor.com
Table of Contents
Cover
Titlepage
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
&
nbsp; Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Acknowledgments
About the Author